Alcester crash victim 'saved people's lives'

Friends and family release balloons into the air during Jenna Benzel's memorial. Jenna's favorite color was blue.

Jenna Benzel had only just started working at the Alcester Care and Rehab Center nursing home facility, but she knew it was where she wanted to be.

"I got another job!!! And I love it! Activities assistant at a nursing home," the 31-year-old wife and mother wrote in a Facebook post July 21. "It's so much fun spending time with all the residents."

Three days later, Benzel was in the center's front parking lot at 9:30 a.m., helping patients with an outdoor aerobics class when a car crashed into the front of the building, injuring six people and killing two, including Benzel.

"It hurts," Bekah Hauert, a friend of Benzel's for three years, said of her death. "I don't know another way to explain it."

Jenna Benzel

The accident occurred when an 81-year-old woman pulled into a driveway area near the building and unintentionally stepped on the gas instead of the brakes, sending the car into the building, South Dakota Highway Patrol spokesman Tony Mangan said.

The identity of the driver and the other person killed have not yet been released by authorities, but Benzel's death resonated in the Sioux Falls area.

Born in Vermillion, Benzel went to high school there and attended Southeast Technical Institute in Sioux Falls.

She left behind a husband, who lives in Harrisburg, and three kids that Hauert said Benzel's entire life was devoted to.

A Facebook post from Jenna Benzel on July 21

"She did everything and anything for her kids," Hauert said. "Stayed at home with her kids this summer, helped out at the school, always taking them to do things. She was the mom that everyone wished they could be."

Hauert spoke of a woman who was always happy and smiling, who was thrilled to be in a job helping people who needed extra care.

"She was so happy, so pumped to be able to give something," Hauert said.

Now, in the same spirit, Hauert and others are working to take some of the stress off the family.

Hauert said the night of the accident, Benzel's husband, Shane, said, "I don't know how I'm going to do this, as a dad by myself."

The answer, from everyone around him, was "because you're going to have all of us."

They've also set up a donation website to take financial stress off the family in the near future as they deal with memorial services, set for 10 a.m. Thursday at Trinity Lutheran Church in Vermillion.

It's all meant to let them know that they're serious — that "they'll do anything and everything to help raise these kids," Hauert said.

Because, as she continued, "to know that all the sudden she’s gone, and these kids are left without a mom, it kind of rattles you to the core.”

'She saved people's lives'

At a vigil in Harrisburg Tuesday evening, hundreds gathered to show their support for the family as they remembered Jenna Benzel.

"There's no place we'd rather live than here," Shane Benzel said, as he spoke to the crowd.

People spoke up as the vigil went on to remember a woman who was always positive, always sharing the good things in her life on Facebook — and as her oldest son Bram, 11, told the crowd, always helping, even in her last moments.

"We went to the care center, where it happened," he said. "We met the person who was with her when she died."

His voice breaking, he relayed what the witness had told him about his mother.

"She pushed people out of the way. She saved people's lives."

Bram Benzel is comforted by his dad Shane Benzel Tuesday during the vigil for his mom Jenna Benzel. Jenna was one of two people killed in a car accident at Alcester Care and Rehab Center nursing home facility Monday morning.